The Deepest Ocean (Eden Series) (27 page)

Exhaustion and pain and terror. It had been wounded again in the struggle with the first killer and the other two were almost on it. She fed it her steady calm, trying to override the agony that burned through its body each time its tailfin flexed. Then she pressed it down into the depths, where it could remain indefinitely while the killers had to surface to breathe.

Rather than breaking away to spout, though, they stayed in pursuit. They easily followed the trail of blood diffusing through the water. Why not, she thought bitterly, when their hunt would end in seconds? They flanked the shark, and when it slewed in an instinctive attempt to escape, teeth snapped at its side and forced it closer to the other whale. Yerena held on with an icy tenacity born through years of Seawatch training and took the shark down to the seabed.
Mud, that might work.

She flung the shark’s diminishing strength into a spurt that took it a bare body’s length ahead of the whales, then sent it into a dive. Its belly scooped a deep furrow in the mud, raising a thick cloud of muck. The churning water behind it was opaque in the next second, and she turned the shark to the right to take advantage of that.

The trick made no difference at all to the whales. Their high-pitched clicks and squeals cut through the cloud of mud as though it didn’t exist, and they turned right as well.

Damn them
. Pain wore away the last of the shark’s resources. It smelled its own blood in the water, and all it could hear were the piercing pulses of the whales’ echolocation, coming from either side shrill and fast, so rapid that they melded into a single alien dirge.

But the wreck was just ahead.
Inside
, Yerena thought, and the shark plunged through a great rent in the galley’s stern. The opening was almost too narrow, and the broken edges of spars gouged raw gashes through the shark’s hide. It was inside, though, and its own instincts kept it moving because the alternative was to drown. Panic and exhaustion began to shut down even its pain, and when its snout punched through a rotting bulkhead it felt nothing.

Behind it, a killer burst into the wrecked galley. She could tell from the sounds of wood splintering that only one of the whales had entered, so the other one was outside, waiting for the shark when it reemerged. The whale had hesitated for only a moment before diving in, but that gave the shark enough time to swim through the first bulkhead.

Now it was halfway through the galley. Barnacles scraped against its hide. Behind it, the whale was gaining. The solid wood of the galley foiled its echolocation, but it hardly needed that when it was so close that its other senses worked just as well.

Abruptly a wall rose just ahead, and she knew they had reached the galley’s prow, so strongly reinforced that even years of undersea rot might not have weakened it enough. She couldn’t risk hurting the shark further, but there was one other direction it could go. Since the galley lay on its starboard side, she sent the shark left.

With a wet crumbling snap, the ship’s ribs broke. The shark plunged through the hull, tail scything, and one of the heavy crossbeams placed horizontally to reinforce the galley’s hull against ramming gave way. The rafter-thick length came down at an angle, blocking the rent in the hull. There was just enough room for the shark’s tail to slip out, but the whale’s head slammed into the timber with enough force to make the entire galley shudder.

Bubbles rose like ghosts through a cloud of blood and wood particles as the whale thrashed to be free. Yerena guessed its air was giving out, reserves almost drained by the long chase underwater and the exertion of plowing through the wreck. The galley’s hull was giving out just as fast, though.

The shark swam clear and turned. Yerena felt its center of gravity tilt, and her field of vision shifted as the shark’s eyes rolled back in its head.

The timber splintered and the whale broke free. It was so intent on its upward climb towards the surface that it didn’t notice the shark until a moment later, and that was a moment too late.

Quenlin kept his consciousness locked to the whale’s frantic mind as rows of triangular teeth sank through blubber and flesh. Pain was pain, no different from anything he had endured in his life, and he was completely detached from the scenario while he ordered the other whale to finish the shark off.

He had never been beaten either by his parents or in Whetstone. Oddly enough, despite earning a reputation as a rebel, he’d never done anything to warrant a whipping—unlike Yerena Fin Caller. What she had brought on herself remained one of the few pleasant memories of his time in Whetstone.

Not that Seawatch normally resorted to beatings. Physical punishment was considered undignified, and once he had taken unauthorized leave to present his case directly to the Unity, a mere whipping wouldn’t have sufficed. A guard in Skybeyond had struck him across the face, hard enough to break his nose.
If we were on the sea, I’d rip you apart
, Quenlin had thought, but the injury had come in useful. He’d allowed himself to collapse, and when the guard had turned away to call for reinforcements—to take him into custody for daring to venture into the presence of the Unity—he’d made his escape.

The killer was drowning slowly, too weakened by lack of air and blood loss to keep fighting, and the unpleasantness penetrated even Quenlin’s trained calm to the point where he had to remove his mind from the situation. Still, the shark was all but dead. He saw its weaving retreat through the remaining killer’s eyes, and she was unwounded.
Kill it.

The killer lashed her tail and swam—in the wrong direction.

What was she doing? None of the killers had disobeyed him to that extent.
It’s wounded, you coward. Finish it off!

The answer came in a swirl of images, pictures made of memories and thoughts and the reflected sounds of song. A pack leaped through the waves, exuberant in their freedom. A whale’s corpse rolled slowly, belly-up, and began its long last journey to the ocean’s depths. A tiny shape swam down from the surface, and as it came closer, black-and-white colors filled in the three-dimensional shadows of sound. In the killer’s imagination or recollection, the calf kept pace with its mother, using her slipstream to conserve its own energy as it nosed for a teat.

So that was it.

Quenlin rolled off his bed of glass, wincing involuntarily but not caring as heat trickled down his shoulders. Whales were more like people than fish when it came to carrying, so the killer wasn’t likely to risk her unborn offspring’s safety any further. He could have locked with her and tried forcing her to attack the shark anyway, but he didn’t think she would have been compliant, not after she had watched the rest of her pack die.

He had lost them all.

He slumped into a chair in a sloppy relaxation of posture that wouldn’t have been permitted in Whetstone. The shark was done for. Of that he was sure. Yerena just might find some sheltered place which could be defended from predators somehow, and she might overcome the prohibition against feeding, and she might also find enough food while the shark slowly healed. Which was a lot of mights. But all that would keep her and the shark well away from the Tureans for a long time, and even under the most promising of circumstances, the shark could not recover completely.
It can’t regrow fins, Yerena.

No, what worried him was the loss of the whale pack. He had depended on the killers to secure his place in the Turean ranks, and a shark should not have been such a challenge, not against three of them at once. Four, if he was counted as well. Except now they were dead or disloyal, which left him with few choices.

On impulse, he thought of the shark.

A link could only be formed through contact with a creature, but being unshackled from Seawatch’s restrictions had given Quenlin the freedom to experiment with different tactics, and one of those was using the killer whales as a stepping-stone to make that contact. He’d done so with the leviathan in the trench, so why not with the white death as well?

He imagined the expressionless black eyes and what lay behind them, slipped into that skull, twisting and turning for the perfect fit like a man trying different keys in a lock.
One bite, that’s all I want—

The shark thrashed as if it had been struck by lightning.

Shock and rage and fear thudded back through the connection. He broke the nascent link, sweat springing out on his skin. So that was why Seawatch had never suggested linking with a creature already held by another operative, much less trying to turn that creature against its original controller. The shark’s mind was too well attuned to Yerena’s, and together the two of them formed a closed circle that he couldn’t break.

One choice left
. He could not be without a weapon in the water for long. The moment the Tureans discovered he had lost the whales, he would become a liability, so he needed something more powerful. Something which could take
Daystrider
between its jaws and crush the ship to splinters.

He looked at the bed of broken glass in weary distaste, but the knowledge of what Jash would do if—no, when—she learned of his loss was incentive enough. The pain faded slowly as it always did, and his mind floated free, searching out what he had discovered in the trench a long time ago, the creature he had seen through the senses of killer whales who had known better than to go anywhere near it.

Lord of the deep, devourer in the abyss, last of the giants and greatest of great sharks. Come to me.

When the last killer swam away, Yerena thought the shark’s senses had started to fail. If she had not shared its body, she would have wondered if it was imagining a peaceful end for itself while it was being ripped apart in reality.

Then the taste of blood filled her mouth as the shark began to feed. It wouldn’t have done that if it was still in danger, so Yerena separated from it. She realized she had forgotten to let it feel its usual reward of pleasure and satisfaction, but that seemed empty at best now.

Rolling over, she opened her eyes and regretted doing so as she saw the dead fisherman. She didn’t want to look at him any longer, but she had to breathe deeply and tell herself not to be a coward before she was able to push his corpse over the side. Of course, it hadn’t occurred to her to weigh him down somehow, and his body remained floating like a silent accusation.

Abruptly it bobbed, his arm moving. Yerena froze before the water rippled around the corpse as the shark rose to the surface. That wasn’t a good sign. Feeding should have taken longer, unless the shark had been driven off by other predators. There was something wrong with the way it swam as well, a slight favoring of one side of its body.

Holding on to the side of the boat, she let herself down into the water and grasped the shark’s dorsal fin as it swam past, then turned her head to take stock of its wounds. She was glad she hadn’t eaten anything for well over a day, because her stomach lurched at the sight.

Just behind the pectoral fin on its right side was a raw wound. The shark’s sheer size helped to some extent—a bite that would have scooped out her body from breastbone to pelvis did not reach its internal organs—but the injury would be painful and incapacitating nonetheless. And its blood was a banner to anything that could smell.

Worse, part of the pectoral fin itself was gone. No wonder the shark’s movement through the water was erratic, since its balance was impaired. The lower tip of its tailfin had been bitten away as well. The sickening possibility occurred to her that the whales had toyed with the shark, tossing it from side to side as they took turns to snap at its fins. Whatever their intentions, the end result was a shark in such a condition that Seawatch would have considered putting a quick end to its misery.

No, not just a shark. Her shark, all she had in the world, all that lay between her and the Iron Ocean.

She rested her forehead against the shark’s dorsal—the only part of it that seemed to have escaped injury—and closed her eyes. Some predator would cross their path before long. Other sharks stayed clear of the white death while it was strong and healthy, but as it weakened they would circle, waiting for it to wear down further. Another pack of killers wouldn’t even bother with that kind of caution.

The shark needed protection and food and rest, three things it wasn’t likely to get in the Iron Ocean, and if she couldn’t give it those, she had to at least make sure it didn’t suffer any more than was necessary.

Abruptly the shark’s body jerked beneath her, harder than if it had been harpooned. The muscles beneath its hide felt like stones. It twisted, tail lashing the water into red spray, and for a terrified moment she thought it was going into spasms in its death agony.

Then her training asserted itself. She had to control and calm the shark even if it was dying, so she closed off her fears, her mind turning clear as a pool of water in the sun. She touched the shark’s consciousness, then sank all the way into it.

She sensed the foreign presence at once—it was all the difference between dropping into the familiar sea and lowering herself into a vat of tar—and she guessed who it was.
Kovir
. She tried to remember his skillname. He was already in retreat, but his being there at all unnerved her. If he tried that again in the middle of a battle…

The shark’s movements eased but its emotions still roiled. Yerena tried to soothe it, crooning under her breath.
It’s all right, you’re safe
. Except the litany didn’t seem to work.